. But I replied rather weakly, "No, I suppose not."

"I'll soon put that right for you," he said cheerily, and about five
minutes later he asked me to press one of the buttons, and there was a
loud tinkling noise. It seemed a pity that at the moment when the bell
did happen to ring there should be nobody to come and answer it.

"Whatever did you do to them?" I asked.

"It only needed a little water," he said, and I had hard work to
suppress my admiration. The very morning before, feeling that I ought
to take a hand in all this practical work that was going on about the
place, I had filled a large watering-can that I found lying about and
wetted some things which someone had stuck into the garden. I have
a kind of idea that they were carrots, but they may have been
maiden-hair ferns. Somehow it had never occurred to me for a moment to
go and water the electric bells.

Almost immediately afterwards this man discovered that all the knives
in the kitchen were blunt and went and fetched some kind of private
grindstone and sharpened them, and then told me that the apple-trees
ought to be grease-banded, which I thought was a thing one only did
to engines. And, when he had brought a hammer and some nails and put
together a large bookcase which had collapsed as soon as _The Outline
of History_ was put on to it (I should like to know whether Canon
BARNES can explain _that_), I was obliged to ask him to stop, in case
the tramping men should see him and strike immediately for fear of the
dilution of labour.

But what impressed me most was the part he took next day in the
Railway Carriage Conference, which curiously enough was on the subject
of strikes. There were several people in the carriage, and they were
talking about what they had done during the railway strike last year,
and what they would do if such a thing happened again. I said I should
like to be a station-master if possible, because they had top-hats and
grew such beautiful flowers. Only four or five trains seem to stop at
our station during the day, and if there was a strike I suppose the
number would be reduced to one or two. And I thought it would be
rather nice to spend the day wearing a top-hat and watering the
nasturtiums in the little rock-gardens behind the platform. Watering,
I said, was quite easy when once one got into the swing of it.

But the man who could do everything seemed to know everything too, and
he told me that station-masters were much too n